Crooked Timber

I’m (slowly) writing the entry on David Lewis for the Stanford Encyclopaedia. Here’s the tentative table of contents.

Convention and Linguistic Meaning

Counterfactuals

Philosophy of Mind

Modal Metaphysics

Everything Else

The last section could do with a snappier title. But the idea is that I start with the two early books, and the papers that build directly on those books (esp “Languages and Language” and “Time’s Arrow”). Then I look at what I think of as the three big themes of Lewis’s career. These are (a) his theory of mind, (b) his reductionism about the nomic (and related topics), (c) modal realism and its consequences for metaphysics, especially modal metaphysics.

The problem is that this leaves out quite a lot. For instance, it leaves out practically everything from “Papers in Philosophical Logic” and “Papers in Ethics and Social Philosophy”. But I do think that trying to find another theme on a par with those three would amount to shoehorning material into a category in which it doesn’t quite fit. (Not that the three themes are entirely distinct.)

But that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t say anything about the rest of Lewis’s career. So I was wondering what I should focus on outside those five sections. To that end, I made a crude search on Google Scholar of which were Lewis’s most cited papers. The full results are below the fold, but the top 15 is a little surprising.

Title

Citations

Counterfactuals

1688

On the Plurality of Worlds

1444

Convention: A Philosophical Study

1423

Scorekeeping in a Language Game

879

General Semantics

862

Causation

555

Adverbs of Quantification

552

New Work for a Theory of Universals

458

Elusive knowledge

384

Probabilities of Conditionals and Conditional Probabilities II

378

Attitudes de dicto and de se

377

Counterfactual Dependence and Time’s Arrow

342

Psychophysical and Theoretical Identifications

336

Counterpart Theory and Quantified Modal Logic

334

Parts of classes

314

Note that the “II” in “Probabilities of Conditionals and Conditional Probabilities” is misleading. Google Scholar thinks that the two papers with roughly this title are just one paper, and it has merged their citations together.

That the books are up top is no surprise. Books generally do much better than papers on Google Scholar. And it isn’t a surprise to some extent that older papers lead the way. They have more time to collect citations. But the showing of the language papers, and in particular the formal semantics papers, is quite stunning. I think I follow Lewis, and Lewisiania, quite a bit, and I can’t recall the last time I saw someone cite “General Semantics”, for instance. So maybe this isn’t the best measure of the importance and influence of the various works.

Full table, and methodology, below the fold.
The trick with searching for Lewis on Google Scholar is that you want to find all of his papers, but you also don’t want the millions of papers written by people called “Lewis” in. My trick was to fix author as “D Lewis”, and have a long disjunction of keywords that it was required to find one of. It’s highly likely that in doing this I’ve left out some prominent papers. The actual search is here=. I then got rid of the non-David Lewis papers, and sorted the remainder by citation count. The full table is below. I’ve cut off the list just after the end of the first page, there are several other papers with a dozen or so citations, but from here on it is very hard to separate the papers from the mis-citations.

Title

Citations

Counterfactuals

1688

On the Plurality of Worlds

1444

Convention: A Philosophical Study

1423

Scorekeeping in a Language Game

879

General Semantics

862

Causation

555

Adverbs of Quantification

552

New Work for a Theory of Universals

458

Elusive knowledge

384

Probabilities of Conditionals and Conditional Probabilities II

378

Attitudes de dicto and de se

377

Counterfactual Dependence and Time’s Arrow

342

Psychophysical and Theoretical Identifications

336

Counterpart Theory and Quantified Modal Logic

334

Parts of classes

314

Subjectivist’s Guide to Objective Chance

274

How to Define Theoretical Terms

247

An Argument for the Identity Theory

213

Putnam’s paradox

212

Languages and Language

201

Truth in Fiction

194

Humean Supervenience Debugged

180

Survival and identity

167

Mad Pain and Martian Pain

163

Causal Explanation

160

Index, Context, and Content

154

Causation as Influence

135

Reduction of Mind

129

Radical interpretation

121

Causal decision theory

110

Finkish Dispositions

105

Counterfactuals and comparative possibility

99

Counterparts of Persons and Their Bodies

99

Defining’Intrinsic’

90

The Paradoxes of Time Travel

88

Semantic Analyses for Dyadic Deontic Logic

82

Postscripts to ‘Causation’

77

Extrinsic Properties

76

Are We Free to Break the Laws?

75

Anselm and Actuality

62

Events

61

Ordering semantics and premise semantics for counterfactuals

60

Against structural universals

59

Truthmaking and Difference-Making

56

Prisoners’ Dilemma Is a Newcomb Problem

56

Veridical Hallucination and Prosthetic Vision

51

Desire as Belief

46

Holes

43

Naming the Colours

42

Sleeping Beauty: reply to Elga

40

Tensing the Copula

36

Lewis, David: Reduction of Mind

34

Postscript to “Mad Pain and Martian Pain”

33

Noneism or Allism?

29

Intensional logics without interative axioms

29

Relevant implication

26

Things qua truthmakers

25

Analog and digital

22

Ramseyan Humility

22

Forget about the ‘correspondence theory of truth’

21

How Many Lives Has Schrödinger’s Cat?

21

Completeness and decidability of three logics of counterfactual conditionals 1

This entry was posted
on Thursday, December 18th, 2008 at 5:38 pm and is filed under Uncategorized.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the comments RSS 2.0 feed.
You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

5 Responses to “Lewis on Google Scholar”

Keith DeRose says:

But the showing of the language papers, and in particular the formal semantics papers, is quite stunning.

My sense is that some disciplines are wired up to Google Scholar to a far greater degree than philosophy is. Something that will be of interest to those in such disciplines will score big with Google. That’s my guess as to what’s going on here.

I don’t know if it’s the result of disciplines being more or less well-represented as much as the fact that papers in semantics are (i) older and (ii) have inter-disciplinary appeal work in metaphysics and ethics simply cannot hope to match. Recently I’ve been looking at a lot of papers in theoretical linguistics, and Lewis is cited there quite a bit (as is Stalnaker as well as, to a lesser extent, Carnap and Davidson). This is followed by papers like “Causation”, “New Work”, and “Elusive Knowledge”, which do not have comparable interdisciplinary appeal, but are loci classici for certain widely discussed views and are thus frequently cited without much discussion. So the results are, in my opinion, unsurprising overall.

As far as how I think an encyclopedia article on Lewis should be structured, your plan sounds very reasonable, especially since a lot of important and apparently stand-alone papers can easily fit into one of your five categories. For instance (to take two of my favorites), “Attitudes de dicto and de se” fits quite naturally in the philosophy of mind section, and “Dispositional Theories of Value” in the reductionism section. “Elusive Knowledge”, though written much later, builds on “Scorekeeping” and can be read as an extended treatment of some material already present in that earlier paper.